“So it goes,” a phrase that repeats often in Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-5, represents the narrator’s—Billy Pilgrim’s—sense of time slipping by him as he sees his life in fragments of snapshots of his most impactful moments. The narrator flips from moment to moment at a frantic pace, returning to the most important scenes often. 

For me, Revere would be a place I would return to constantly. Classes, lunches, long nights studying, tests (both successful and not so much), and commuting all blend together into a fuzzily high-school shaped picture, but some moments stick out to me more clearly. Conducting my first interview for Lantern, printing out all 45 pages of my Sludge lab report for Honors Physical Science, reading lines for Antigone while wearing a bedsheet as a toga in my 9th grade English class, finding out just how difficult Chemistry was, and finding out in my sophomore year Latin class that everyone was leaving school for something called “Covid” all stand out to me as high-definition vignettes that I can return to as easily as Pilgrim could. The moments that stand out to me the most are not necessarily the most enjoyable, but they are the ones that taught me the most. 

For anyone beginning high school at Revere, I would advise them to take risks in every aspect of their high school experience—I don’t remember my easy classes nearly as well as my challenging ones—and jump into trying things they may be unsure of. For my first two years of high school, I played on the Golf team. Even now, I can see myself back on the 18 holes of our home course, remembering the difficult putts, times I hit a tree (or nearly hit a coach) and drives that sailed straight down the fairway. However, I don’t remember the mediocre shots that I played it safe on or time spent trying to remember just how many times I hit the ball on that hole. My brain picked the steepest peaks to remember, whether they drift towards the fairway or the pond. One hole in particular required a tee-off over a body of water immediately—you couldn’t play it safe. In order to make it to the place I wanted to be, I had to take a risk of losing my ball—maybe one of the few that I had remembered to stuff into my golf bag that day. 

Billy Pilgrim never returned to the moments where he did nothing more than he usually did—he went back only to the unusual. Like Pilgrim, the usual, safe routine blends together into one massive long-exposure panoramic snapshot, with moments of clarity on the moments where I experienced something that truly stood out to me, as if someone had been staring at the camera during the shot while everything else bustled around them.

For newcomers to Revere High School, I encourage you to make moments where you sit and look at the camera for a while. Luckily, Revere will offer you many opportunities to do so.